1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains to a video system that compresses video data for transmission or storage and decompresses the video data for display. More particularly, the invention pertains to a video system and a method for intracoding video data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Video systems transmit, process and store large quantities of video data. To create a video presentation, such as a video movie, a rendering video system displays the video data as a plurality of digital images, also referred to as “frames,” thereby simulating movement. In order to achieve a video presentation with an acceptable video quality, or to enable transmission and storage at all, a conventional video system modifies the video data prior to transmission or storage. For instance, the video system compresses and encodes the video data to reduce the bit rate for storage and transmission.
In a conventional video system a video encoder is used to compress and encode the video data and a video decoder is used to decompress and to decode the video data. The video encoder outputs video data that has a reduced bit rate and a reduced redundancy. That is, the technique of video compression removes spatial redundancy within a video frame or temporal redundancy between consecutive video frames.
The video encoder and video decoder may be configured to apply one of two types of coding to compress the video stream, namely intracoding and intercoding. These two types of coding are based on the statistical properties of the video frames. When the video frames are coded using intracoding, the compression is based on information contained in a single frame (the frame that is compressed) by using the spatial redundancy within the frame. Intracoding, thus, does not depend on any other frames. In contrast, intercoding uses at least one other frame as a reference and codes a difference between the frame to be compressed and the reference frame. Intercoding is thus based on a temporal redundancy between consecutive frames in the video data.
The field of video compression is subject to international standards, e.g., International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standard H.263 that defines uniform requirements for video coding and decoding. In addition, manufacturers of video coders and decoders modify or build upon the international standards and implement proprietary techniques for video compression.
Despite the existence of the international standards and the proprietary techniques, there is still a need for improved techniques for video compression. For example, as the quality of a displayed video movie depends directly from the technique used for video compression, any improvement of the video compression technique makes the video movie more pleasing for the viewer.